


Engineers Extraordinare

by raven_aorla



Category: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Steam Powered Giraffe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-16
Updated: 2013-04-16
Packaged: 2017-12-08 15:29:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/762991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raven_aorla/pseuds/raven_aorla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three young geniuses with very weird lives secretly meet for friendly get-togethers whenever they can. These are the rules.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Engineers Extraordinare

The first rule of the Engineers Extraordinaire Club isn't that you don't talk about it - that's the second rule. The first is that you call yourselves "Eccentric Engineers" rather than "Mad Scientists" because even though Dr. Horrible is in the Evil League of Evil Billy's sanity is perfectly fine, thank you, while Petes thinks of himself as Lawful Neutral and Buster justly points out that you're all more engineers than actual scientists. Also Petes has some choice words about the popular conflating of madness with being evil when that is yet another form of discrimination against the differently abled, but when he's in danger of another righteous monologue you or Buster tend to distract him with amusing cat videos.

You'd think the guy had enough cat in his life to fulfill all his feline fanboying, but you might be prejudiced since you met him when he rescued you from his giant fluffy beast Marshmallow when you were trying to locate a very powerful self-sustaining interdimensional portal that Bad Horse demanded you investigate and steal if possible. He was sufficiently impressed by your horror at learning said portal was keeping a 116-year-old sentient automaton alive and had already caused said sentient automaton more than seventy years of isolation in a locked vault before Petes figured out how to safely contain it, and your willingness to lie to the ELE because some things are just too evil, that you were able to become kind of friends.

 

The second rule, as stated before, is that none of you talk about the Engineers Extraordinaire Club. It would be bad enough for your reputation and the possible advantages the less scrupulous members of the ELE would try to take against the Walters, who at least pay some attention to laws and only break them if they think it's both necessary and victimless. But at least you're mostly on your own - Moist would be sad if something happened to you but he'd still have a career with the Henchman's Union - while Petes has a legacy to uphold and neither a secret identity nor a way to go anywhere incognito 'cause of his difficulties in the visage department as it were (you try to be sensitive about it). Buster meanwhile could disguise himself if need be but since Becile Industries has a lot of subtle shadiness going on behind the scenes that would make it a Very Big Deal if it became known he was spending occasional weekends chilling with his counterpart in a century-old family feud.

Related to this is the third rule, which is you don't talk about business except in the most vague terms. That way if Dr. Horrible robs a steel mill the other guys will have plausible deniability, the gentler Billy Buddy can have a social life with people who will understand him and won't try to make him confess Horrible schemes, and also you can just be lonely brilliant geek-dudes together for a while. 

Also, since Petes can't go anywhere at all without being recognized or really conspicuous in efforts not to be recognized - his one attempt to don a burqa and pass as a Saudi woman with laryngitis was both culturally questionable and logistically unfortunate - you guys meet in San Diego in a private hotel suite near the outskirts of the city, an unlisted reservation that you're supposed to take turns for but you often pay when it's actually Petes' turn because Petes did save your life and decided not to call the cops. Besides, you know the Walters are constantly scrambling to maintain their estate and even if their neat robot band is doing better lately you figure the Manor could use a lot more maintenance. This is Rule Four and it's worked out pretty well. 

Rule Five states that it is acceptable to crash in said hotel suite overnight if you stay really late or do any drinking and shouldn't drive back to LA until morning. Buster almost always crashes there and Petes sometimes does if his friend/employee - he doesn't like the term "henchman" or "minion" and you suppose that's a Lawful Neutral thing - Michael Reed can't give him a ride home until the next day. Michael Reed knows about the Club but is fine with giving "Peter Six" some space to interact with people outside of the world he's largely trapped in, and so hasn't tried to join in and is good at keeping everything discreet. You try not to be jealous about the loving, if wacky, emotional support a Walter would get compared to your lot in life or the colder corporate ethos drummed into a Becile from an early age.

Rule Six is that while ribbing one another is one of the points of hanging out in the first place, when one of you says something is too far or too much or too soon you stop right then. Whatever you are outside these walls, you are friends here, and you are here to feel better about stuff and have a pleasant time and not want to go detonate a lot of explosives afterwards because a joke came too close to home.

Rule Seven allows for a wide variety of video games, board games, card games, and just plain sitting around talking about silly things to be possible activities, except for poker. Because Petes was partially raised by robots that learned poker in the trenches of WWI and continued to play it in the foxholes of WWII and the campsites of the Vietnam War, so can wipe the floor with pretty much anyone else. Plus the best poker face can't outdo an implacable wooden mask.

Rule Eight is that some nights Petes is okay with taking the mask off and eating and drinking casually. If he is, you don't take pictures, you don't comment, you don't stare, you don't try to measure the energy readings with your specially coded iPhone app. On nights when he isn't okay you politely pause the game of Mario Kart or whatever so he can hide in the bathroom long enough to eat half a sandwich and down a glass of water.

Rule Nine is that nobody calls you Dr. Horrible in case there's any surveillance happening. You're just Billy. The other guys function as though they have no last names within these walls, and Petes doesn't have five ancestors with the exact same name as far as you're concerned. Besides you heard Petes' great-aunt got married to Buster's great-uncle a few years after Norman Becile moved to Walter Manor so that's yet another reason using family background as a reason to hate each other is stupid.

Rule Ten is that while there are two beds and a couch so even if all three of you end up staying the night you can have your own space, if someone ends up cuddling someone else for a while, you don't talk about this either. You've all got ghosts and for all your intelligence...well, society as a system may be absurd and awful but this little system here is okay.


End file.
